Prominent conservatives are pushing conspiracy theories about the death of Christopher Sign, the reporter who broke the story about Bill Clinton’s controversial secret tarmac meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016 while Hillary Clinton was being investigated for using a private email server. Sign passed away this weekend. Authorities are investigating the 45-year-old’s death as a suicide.
Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) have already started casting the tragedy as a “Clinton Body Count” conspiracy.
On Instagram, Trump asked if his followers had “seen so many suicide coincides ever.”
Boebert made a similar suggestion on Twitter.
“Why is it that so many who cross the Clinton Crime Syndicate end up dead?” she captioned a clip of Sign on Fox & Friends a couple years ago talking about death threats he received after reporting on the Clinton-Lynch meeting.
Other large, Republican-leaning accounts made the same implication that the Clintons were somehow involved.
“Just the reporter who broke the Bill Clinton/Loretta Lynch secret tarmac meeting. Nothing to see here. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence,” John Cardillo tweeted sarcastically.
Many pushed back against rumors that Sign’s death was anything but suicide.
“Why is it that the older I get more people I know die?” reads one comment on Boebert’s tweet.
The conspiracy theories about Sign’s death are similar to those about both Jeffrey Epstein and Seth Rich’s murder. Epstein committed suicide in a jail cell; many have insisted that he was actually murdered.
Rich was slain in an apparent robbery attempt in 2016. Conservatives spent years falsely claiming that he was killed for leaking the Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks.
Rich’s family subsequently sued some who spread this rumor, including Fox News, which retracted its reporting and settled with Rich’s parents in 2020. Another conspiracy theorist who spread such lies apologized and retracted his statements earlier this year as part of a settlement in a case brought by Rich’s brother.
It appears that conservatives are now endeavoring to give Sign’s untimely death the same conspiracy theory treatment.